Today, Life Dynamics Inc., a national pro-life organization located in Denton, Texas applauds the decision by North Carolina lawmakers to allocate $10 million to compensate victims who were forcefully sterilized under the state’s secret eugenics program.

From 1929 to 1974, North Carolina forcibly sterilized thousands of people who were deemed to be mentally handicapped, promiscuous or unfit to have children. Life Dynamics has documented the history of the American Eugenics Society including North Carolina’s forced sterilization program in our film, Maafa21: Black Genocide in 21st Century America.

The term eugenics was coined in the mid 1800’s by Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton believed in trying to increase those he felt were superior in stock and decrease those he felt were inferior. This ideology still exists today in organizations that promote population control and abortion.

The idea of forced eugenics was not something that suddenly developed in the 1970s. In 1907, Indiana had become the first of more than 30 states to pass sterilization laws and some of those laws stayed on the books well into the 1970s. In fact, the State of Oregon did its last sterilization in 1981 and did not abolish its eugenics board until October of 1983.

There were some within the eugenics movement who were uncomfortable with the idea of using force and they would express their reservations about it in public. But when pressed, virtually none of them would rule it out – including Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger.

Margaret Sanger advocated sterilization of the so-called unfit, in 1950 in a personal letter she wrote to Katharine Dexter McCormick, an heir to the International Harvester fortune who used her immense wealth to fund the development of the birth-control pill. Sanger wrote, “I consider that the world and almost our civilization for the next twenty-five years, is going to depend upon a simple, cheap, safe contraceptive to be used in poverty stricken slums, jungles, and among the most ignorant people. Even this will not be sufficient, because I believe that now, immediately; there should be national sterilization for certain dysgenic types of our population who are being encouraged to breed and would die out were the government not feeding them.”

Sanger’s connections to eugenics was nothing new. She had long praised their ideologies and published several articles on the topic in her Birth Control Review. In 1935, Sanger’s American Birth Control League published a resolution to unite with the American Eugenics Society.